Brazil is a country of contrasts and contradictions. Crowded urban centres give way to massive soy and cattle farms, while traditional communities live simply in the world’s most biodiverse reserve on the earth. It’s vibrant and captivating – every traveller’s dream destination – yet Brazil faces many social and environmental challenges invisible to the average traveller.
A two-week, immersive learning journey to Brazil offers a chance to truly experience the pulse of Brazil. While it brings travellers to destinations not indicated on regular tourist maps, it also teaches them about the state of the cities, food systems, biodiversity, inequalities and politics. Engage with grassroots level social action in urban hubs and witness vast field of grazing cattle and the struggles associated with it. Grapple with issues of population density and transport system failures and stand in awe of nature in its most pristine form, far removed from the human sprawl.
From urban Sao Paulo, via the central agricultural region of Tocantins and into the depths of the Amazon jungle, this encounter will shake all your senses and present an immersion like no other.
IMMERSIVE LEARNING
An immersive learning journey is an exciting and hands-on way to learn, unlearn and discover not only a different country, but also a different side of yourself. Traditional classrooms are replaced with engaging conversations based both on academic and non-academic readings. Laptops and spreadsheets are replaced with dynamic debates and hand-written realisations made while commuting in the city or camping in the wilderness.
Trips to visit grassroots organisations, farms, social movements, traditional communities and entrepreneurship initiatives form the practical side of the learning experience. The arguments found in the readings are brought to life on the ground and could either emphasise or contradict what is really going on. Throughout, travellers are urged to journal their personal experience and transformation.
IMMERSIVE TRAVELLING
The trip stretches over two weeks and visits three destinations. The first five days are spent getting to grips with the city of Sao Paulo, where 11 million people fight for a place to live amid rapid population growth, urban sprawl, informal settlements, and environmental degradation. Here travellers will meet four activists and entrepreneurs passionate about politics, business and ecology who are radically changing the city from the ground up.
From here the trip heads to Caseara in central Brazil where three worlds collide: cattle farm and its soybean sprawl, a landless workers movement campsite, and a small corner of the Amazon jungle. Travellers will witness how the world’s diet is shaping the Brazilian countryside and how locals are responding while living close to the action in a permanent campsite.
The trip then takes a radical turn for six days in the heart of the Amazon, living among the Tumbira community, a group of 200 local people from all walks of life. Travellers will see what happens when all the city’s resources and politics are stripped away to reveal only nature both in its simplicity and its abundance as they learn how to live with the forest and not from the forest.
A LIVED EXPERIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS TRAVELLER
This experience is for those who like travelling to areas beyond the tourist brochures and who want to connect authentic experiences with global thinking and research. It’s a lived experience. It challenges travellers to embrace the local context and become part of the everyday life rather than remain an outsider with a camera. Travelling like this is about delving into a place, spending time there, rather than flying through, ticking off sights, and taking selfies. Travelling like this is slow, local, and mindful.
For more enquiries/To book a space: Please contact Eduardo Shimahara at shima@sustainabilityinstitute.net by 15 July 2018.